RESEARCH Open Access

Implementing recovery: an analysis of the key

technologies in Scotland
Jennifer Smith-Merry
1*
, Richard Freeman
2
and Steve Sturdy
3
Abstract
Background: Over the past ten years the promotion of recovery has become a stated aim of mental health
policies within a number of English speaking countries, including Scotland. Implementation of a recovery approach
involves a significant reorientation of mental health services and practices, which often poses significant challenges
for reformers. This article examines how four key technologies of recovery have assisted in the move towards the
creation of a recovery-oriented mental health system in Scotland.
Methods: Drawing on documentary analysis and a series of interviews we examine the construction and
implementation of four key recovery technologies as they have been put to use in Scotland: recovery narratives,
the Scottish Recovery Indicator (SRI), Wellness Recovery Action Planning (WRAP) and peer support.
Results: Our findings illuminate how each of these technologies works to instantiate, exemplify and disseminate a
recovery orientation at different sites within the mental health system in order to bring about a recovery oriented
mental health system. They also enable us to identify some of the factors that facilitate or hinder the effectiveness
of those technologies in bringing about a change in how mental health services are delivered in Scotland. These
finding provide a basis for some general reflections on the utility of recovery technologies to implement a shift
towards recovery in mental health services in Scotland and elsewhere.
Conclusions: Our analysis of this process within the Scottish context will be valuable for policy makers and service
coordinators wishing to implement recovery values within their own national mental health systems.
Background
In recent years, the promotion of recovery has been
adopted as a declared aim of mental health policy in a
number of countries, including Australia, the United
Kingdom and the United States [1-3]. Quite what is
meant by recovery in these different settings is difficult to
pin down with any degree of specificity. Recovery is not
defined by any particular set of therapeutic or preventive
practices or services; rather, it represents a more general
if rather vague philosophy of mental health care.
However, it is possible to identify a number of key
values at the heart of the idea of recovery. Central to
these is the idea that recovery is a highly individual pro-
cess, that is best achieved by utilising an individuals own
knowledge and experiences of coping with mental illness
and working towards mental wellbeing. Consequently,
effective delivery of therapeutic and preventive interven-
tions should be individualised and person-centred, and
should privilege the service users self-knowledge over
standardised forms of clinical practice. This in turn is
commonly understood to necessitate a radical transfor-
mation of mental health systems away from traditional
clinical hierarchies, standardised models of care and
highly medicalised understandings of mental health and
ill-health.
Unsurprisingly, the implementation of these goals has
often proved difficult, and critics have argued that in
many cases the adoption of recovery in policy discourse
has not been matched by a change in mental health prac-
tice (e.g. [4]). This has been exacerbated by uncertainty
about how recovery values can and should be realised
within mental health systems (e.g. [5,6]). Implementing
recovery in practice thus remains a significant policy
challenge, even in countries that profess a commitment
to recovery as a general policy aim.
* Correspondence: jennifer.smith-merry@sydney.edu.au
1
School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, School of
Public Health, University of Sydney
Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
Smith-Merry et al. International Journal of Mental Health Systems 2011, 5:11
http://www.ijmhs.com/content/5/1/11
2011 Smith-Merry et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This paper looks at Scotland as an example of a coun-
try where incorporation of recovery into mental health
practice has been at least partially successful. As a suc-
cession of policy documents shows, Scottish mental
health policy has increasingly embraced the concept of
recovery over the past five years (e.g.[7-9]). The Scottish
Government has expressly set out to implement a recov-
ery oriented mental health system and has invested sig-
nificant funding and effort in order to achieve this.
Drawing on data from interviews and documentary
sources, we show that, to the extent that such policy
initiatives have been successful in changing the orienta-
tion and practices of the mental health services, this has
been accomplished through the dissemination of a series
of what we call recovery technologies. We use this
term to refer to various kinds of techniques, practices
and instruments that embody and instantiate the values
of recovery, and that provide a means of enacting those
values within the mental health system.
Focussing on four such technologies that were identi-
fied by our informants as particularly important in pro-
moting recovery in the Scottish context, we examine
how those technologies were constructed or imported
into Scotland, and how they have been implemented in
practice. We also identify some of the factors that our
informants see as contributing to or compromising their
effectiveness in reorienting Scottish mental health ser-
vices around the values of recovery.
Methods
The research presented here is based on data from
interviews and primary source documents concerning
the development and institutionalisation of recovery in
Scotland. The data was collected as part of the large
European-wide project, KnowandPol, which has investi-
gated the function of knowledge in relation to health
and education policy. Twelve research teams work on
this theme at different sites across Europe and the work
of our particular team has focused on mental health pol-
icy in Scotland. Our interest in the process was there-
fore with regard to what knowledge was used to
produce recovery as a policy, how this knowledge was
implemented and what knowledge was created through
this implementation process.
Interview respondents were chosen to provide a vari-
ety of perspectives on how recovery functions in Scot-
land. We conducted nine interviews with practitioners
(including those working in psychiatry and as service
managers), government policy makers, individuals work-
ing within non-governmental advocacy organisations
and service users/community activists. Based on pre-
vious research on the mental health system in Scotland,
these roles were selected to provide a good balance of
the different kinds of people involved in work on
recovery in this context [10]. Interviews were semi-
structured and revolved around the history and imple-
mentation of recovery from the perspective of the
respondent. We analysed the results as we collected the
data and stopped interviewing when our data reached
saturation in the sense that new interviews were no
longer producing new data.
Primary source documents included policy documents,
reviews and working papers on recovery, and were cre-
ated by the Scottish Government, service user groups
and non-government organisations working within the
Scottish mental health system over the past ten years.
All data were entered into the data management soft-
ware NVivo and then hand-coded according to actor
and theme. We ordered the data chronologically and
constructed from it a narrative of the development of
recovery in Scotland.
From our data we were able to identify four key tech-
nologies which have been utilised in the implementation
of recovery within Scottish mental health work, and to
document how they were developed for use in Scotland
and some of the factors that are seen to have enhanced
or hindered their implementation in that context.
Results
What recovery is, and how it came to Scotland
Recovery is living. I think its as simple as that. I
think weve complicated it. I just think recovery is
getting on with life...I dont think anybody knows
[the definition] for a collective. I think every indivi-
dual knows the answer for themselves. - (Commu-
nity 1
1
)
We began all of our interviews by asking respondents
to define recovery. The establishment of an appropriate
definition of recovery has long been a concern for those
interested in promoting work on recovery [11]. How-
ever, our interviews revealed a striking diversity of views
on how recovery might best be defined. Indeed, some
interviewees commented explicitly on the multiplicity of
definitions and the broadness of the idea, which makes
it very difficult to pin down (Community 2; Practitioner
2; Community 1). All agreed, however, that the imple-
mentation of recovery in mental health practice is criti-
cally dependent on the life situation and history of each
individual service user and practitioner. Some spoke of
recovery as a process or journey, leading toward a shift
in consciousness and practice, while some defined it as
a value or set of values that centred around choice and
the centrality of the individual (Practitioner 1; Practi-
tioner 2; NGO 1; NGO 2; Community 1; Community 2).
This focus on individuals and their personal journeys
was in turn seen to imply that the implementation of
recovery in the mental health system necessitates a
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radical restructuring of modes of treatment, hierarchies
of knowledge, and the way services relate to service
users (Practitioner 1; NGO 1; NGO 2).
Just as our respondents differed in their definitions of
recovery, they also offered different stories of where the
recovery discourse first originated. However, all empha-
sised that the concept had been imported into Scotland
from elsewhere, either from the US or New Zealand. Our
respondents also emphasised that the idea had originally
emerged from within the service user movement, and
that individual service users and service user groups had
been important in creating momentum around the idea
in Scotland (NGO 1; Community 2; NGO 2; Community
1; e.g. [12]). Enthusiasm for recovery within these groups
eventually led to the idea being incorporated into Scot-
tish mental health policy through the National Pro-
gramme for Improving Mental Health and Wellbeing.
Following the launch of the National Programme in
2003, a Scottish Recovery Network (SRN) was estab-
lished and funded to progress work and knowledge on
recovery. While operating as a quasi-autonomous gov-
ernment agency from the start the SRN has maintained
an independence from the Scottish Government through
direction from a strong and active board whose member-
ship is dominated by service users and practitioners [13].
From this policy and organisational base, recovery was
quickly adopted as a policy priority within a succession
of mental health policy documents including Delivering
for Mental Health (2006), concerned with directing ser-
vice delivery, and the review of mental health nursing
Rights, Relationships and Recovery (2006) [14]. Each pol-
icy initiative has sought to implement or reaffirm tools
and technologies for bringing about a recovery oriented
mental health system in Scotland.
Technologies of recovery
As we have seen, our respondents tended to associate
recovery with a set of values that prioritised the indivi-
dual experiences, needs and choices of service users.
Scottish Government policy on recovery deliberately
aimed at inculcating these same values into mental
health service delivery. As one government actor com-
mented:
So recovery. Tactically we are using it as a key way
to get into the cultures and behaviours of the sys-
tem...structurally the issues around respect and the
quality of the interaction between the people receiv-
ing and the people offering the services is going to
be the big thing....the first and biggest challenge that
we have is to re-humanise services. But recovery,
because it is actually dealing with that territory, is a
good way into it. - (Government 2)
But this entailed more than simply asserting the ideals
and values of recovery in policy documents. It also
involved official endorsement and encouragement of a
number of recovery technologies that were seen to
embody the values associated with recovery, and that
provided a means of realising those values within the
Scottish mental health system.
Among the practices that our respondents associated
with the values of recovery were realising recovery
training, values-based practice training, a narrative
project, the Scottish Recovery Indicator, peer support,
and Wellness Recovery Action Planning (Practitioner 2;
Government 2; Practitioner 1; Community 1; NGO 1;
Community 2; NGO 2). Of these, four in particular
were seen to have been especially effective in dissemi-
nating the values of recovery and in reconfiguring Scot-
tish mental health practice and service delivery around
those values. These were recovery narratives, the Scot-
tish Recovery Indicator, Wellness Recovery Action Plan-
ning, and peer support. We discuss each of these four
technologies separately before moving on to reflect on
their utility in orienting the mental health system in
Scotland towards recovery.
Recovery narratives
The use of narrative work in relation to recovery
appears to have originated in New Zealand, in a project
undertaken by Hilary Lapsley and others [15]. For this
project, researchers supported by the Mental Health
Commission collected stories from individual New Zeal-
anders who had experienced from mental ill health and
who felt that they had recovered from it to a greater or
lesser extent. The resulting report, entitled Kia Mauri
Tau! narratives of recovery from disabling mental
health problems, was released in 2002 and was cited as
an influential document by several of our respondents
(Government 1; Community 2; [16]). The collected nar-
ratives served in effect to define and exemplify recovery.
Moreover, as the title suggests, they located this specifi-
cally in the context of New Zealand culture and identity,
in a way that appears to have been highly effective in
building a social movement around recovery.
This model was closely followed in Scotland. A narra-
tive research project was initiated by SRN in 2004 and
involved collecting narratives of recovery from 64 people
across Scotland with lived experience of mental ill-
health [17]. The purpose was to learn from individual
experiences of recovery, share stories to inspire hope,
offer tools and techniques for recovery, establish a
Scottish evidence base, use this evidence to develop
policy and practice and guide and inform the work of
SRN [18]. Such narratives served among other things
to demonstrate the effectiveness of recovery; as one of
our respondents put it:
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Narratives are an important evidence base. -
(NGO 3)
As in the New Zealand case, moreover, our respon-
dents spoke of the importance of SRNs narrative project
for developing understanding about recovery within a
specifically Scottish context (Government 1; Practitioner
1; Community 2; NGO 3):
There was a strong focus about...what recovery
means in Scotland and the narrative research project
run by the Scottish Recovery Network helped to do
this. - (Community 2)
Respondents spoke about the narrative project as
working to Scottishise recovery by ensuring that the
values presented through Scottish recovery work were
reflecting what the community of service users under-
stood recovery as (NGO 1; NGO 2; Community 2). This
Scottish version of recovery, like the New Zealand ver-
sion before it, was explicitly presented as distinct and
different from an American version of recovery which
was portrayed as being more mono-cultural, less
community centred and less flexible with regard to
personal situations and needs (NGO 1; NGO 2; [19,20]).
Interestingly, it is not clear that the approach to recov-
ery that was adopted in America at that time did in fact
differ significantly from what was adopted in the Scot-
tish context (Community 2). On the contrary, contem-
porary American definitions of recovery had much in
common with how recovery was represented in New
Zealand and Scotland [3] - a situation that one of our
respondents attributed to the rapid circulation of a
small number of influential texts by authors such as
William Anthony [21] and Patricia Deegan [22,23]
within a relatively small international community (Com-
munity 2). One function of the collection of Scottish
recovery narratives thus appears to have been to help to
strengthen an indigenous recovery movement by articu-
lating a shared Scottish identity around recovery in con-
trast to a fictional American other.
The narrative project served as a flagship project
which functioned to raise the profile of SRN, and recov-
ery more generally, amongst service users and practi-
tioners (Practitioner 1). It did this by getting individual
service users and groups involved in the project, by
advertising the project to the mental health service com-
munity, and through the wide distribution of the report
in different forms. Individual narratives were brought
together in a DVD and a book, 20,000 of which had
been distributed by mid 2007 (NGO 3). The narratives
were also analysed in order to identify and assess the
factors which had helped and hindered individual recov-
ery [18]. The findings were released as a report in 2007
and have served to provide a Scottish definition of
recovery and an indication of how work on recovery
should progress. As SRN has written, This project has
provided the foundation to all of our work [17].
The narrative approach has also found its way into the
practice of doing recovery with service users. One psy-
chiatrist we spoke to mentioned the way that service
users were involved in writing their own story as part
of their journey to recovery (Practitioner 2). Through
writing their own stories of recovery, service users iden-
tify and reflect on what recovery means in their own
lives, thereby internalising the concept, as do practi-
tioners who employ a narrative approach as part of their
therapeutic practice. Some services have also developed
their own, local narrative projects. For example, the
Patients Council at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital has
released its own book, Stories of Changing Lives, which
has a very similar format to previous narrative publica-
tions [24]. As this example shows, narrative work has
become an established technology in recovery-oriented
mental health services, and works to instantiate and
exemplify the concept of recovery in the mental health
system in a number of ways. As individual narratives are
created by service users and used as a therapeutic tool
by practitioners, so the practice and values of recovery
are implemented, reproduced and incorporated into the
institutional knowledge of the mental health services.
The Scottish Recovery Indicator
Another way that the findings of the SRNs narrative
project had an impact on mental health service delivery
was through the design of the Scottish Recovery Indica-
tor (SRI) (NGO 2). This is a self-assessment tool for
measuring the extent to which services are implement-
ing a recovery-oriented practice model in their work.
The idea of creating such a tool initially came out of
discussions of the implications of the 2006 review of
mental health nursing, Rights, Relationships and Recov-
ery, and other discussions on culture and behaviour
that were happening around that time (Government 2;
NGO 2). The creation of a recovery indicator for ser-
vices was seen as necessary in order to clarify what was
important and possible in terms of recovery-oriented
practice:
At the time of the nursing review it was thought we
were asking a lot of people to do things and people
didnt really know what they should be doing and
what recovery practice in process was. - (NGO 1)
A proposal to establish a recovery indicator was
quickly incorporated into the mental health service
policy document Delivering for Mental Health, which
was released in late 2006. Planning for the tool began
immediately and it was piloted in 2007. In 2009 the
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Scottish Government committed itself to implementing
the SRI in Towards a Mentally Flourishing Scotland:
Policy and Action Plan, 2009-2011 which guides work
on population mental health in Scotland [8].
In developing the SRI, careful attention was paid to
the specificities of the Scottish context. The SRI tool
was modelled on a US tool, the Recovery Oriented Prac-
tices Index (ROPI) which had been developed by
Anthony Mancini, an academic now working at Colum-
bia University, for use within the New York State Office
of Mental Health [25]. ROPI was identified as a suitable
starting point for the development of a new indicator
for use in Scotland (Government 2). The development
of the SRI involved a process of Scottishisation (Com-
munity 2; NGO 1) that included not just adopting it to
Scottish language and terminology, but also redesigning
it to take account of, and make it more amenable to,
the kinds of practices associated with recovery in Scot-
land (NGO 1; NGO 2). Design of the new tool was
undertaken under the auspices of the Scottish Recovery
Network, who drew on the findings of their own narra-
tive research project to provide an understanding of
what recovery meant in a Scottish context (NGO 2).
The tool was subsequently tested in several pilot sites to
make sure it worked within Scottish settings. As with
the narrative project the Scottishisation process that
the tool went through contributed to ownership of the
concept by those in Scotland.
One particularly striking difference between the SRI
and the ROPI was that the SRI was developed for use as
a means of self-assessment, rather than for purposes of
external evaluation. As one of our respondents observed:
The ROPI was much more stick than it was carrot...
It was an external evaluation and that is the antith-
esis of recovery for us in Scotland. So it might be
that in America you can go and say to a service this
is what you are doing wrong and this is what you
are doing right but we have a different interpretation
of recovery. Recovery is you are doing the right
thing for you at the right time. - (NGO 2)
As this quotation demonstrates, self-assessment - as
opposed to external audit - was viewed as part of a dis-
tinctively Scottish understanding of recovery (Commu-
nity 2). The SRI thus provides a peculiarly illuminating
insight into what recovery has come to mean in relation
to Scottish mental health services.
The use of the SRI revolves around online forms
which are completed by staff working in services being
assessed. Staff are led step by step through the comple-
tion of the form, and must answer questions relating to
the extent to which recovery practices are evident within
different aspects of their services. For example, staff are
directed to consider their practices relating to patient
assessment in order to ensure they take into account
specified aspects of an individuals basic needs includ-
ing housing, nutrition, physical health, entitlements, per-
sonal care and spiritual care. Practitioners are directed
to look for evidence that appropriate practises are
included in their services. The form provides examples
of the kinds of evidence that might be considered rele-
vant [26]:
Entitlements: Service assists with entitlements,
advocacy and general advice e.g. legal, financial and
housing. (Where indirectly provided, respondents
should evidence knowledge of local agencies and
offer examples of individual referrals.)
Personal care: Service provides help with personal
care, as required. This could include personal
hygiene, attention to clothing, haircuts, etc.
Spiritual care: Service records expression of religious
or belief-based needs and enables access as
required.
Detailed guidelines also make clear just what kind of
work is involved in using the SRI. Successful completion
of the online forms requires planning and preparation,
including the allocation of tasks between members of
the team undertaking the self-assessment. It involves
extensive data collection, including review of documents
but also interviews with service providers and with cur-
rent and previous service users, followed by discussion
and reflection on the strengths and weaknesses identi-
fied and the issues raised. The whole process is expected
to take a minimum of thirteen hours to complete. And
as the guidelines make clear, this in turn requires
agreement and commitment from the various staff
members taking part [26]. In effect, the whole self-
assessment process is designed to immerse the staff
completing the SRI within the recovery approach. SRI-
based self-assessment is thus a significant step in a men-
tal health services journey towards a recovery orienta-
tion. Several of our respondents argued that, through
being obliged to undertake the SRI self-assessment exer-
cise, those working in service provision would reconcep-
tualise their services through a recovery lens, and would
thereby come to implement a recovery approach more
effectively (Practitioner 2; NGO 2; Practitioner 1). In
this respect, the process of completing the SRI was seen
to be more important than the data that it produced.
What we have found in tests and now is that the
conversation is everything. So you have a team of
people doing it...and having a conversation about it
and saying well the implications for us are we never
talk about strengths. We are an acute admissions
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ward, why would we want to talk about strengths?
They are ill. Well actually when you talk about
strengths people talk about what they can do and
that creates hope. Oh right. Ok. Thats an interest-
ing concept, I hadnt thought of that before -
(NGO 1)
The use of the SRI technology thus provides a useful
way of drawing service providers attention to aspects of
recovery within their own services that they might not
otherwise have seen in this light.
At the same time, the data generated by the SRI pro-
vide service providers with useful evidence about the
extent of recovery practices within their organisation.
Each organisation can then use this as a baseline against
which to improve their performance on the various
aspects of recovery identified by the indicator (Practi-
tioner 1). And on a national scale, data produced using
the SRI serves to demonstrate that recovery is not
merely a vague concept to which lip service is paid, but
is actually being implement in Scotland: the recovery
indicator tool has shown us that there is a lot of recov-
ery-oriented work going on but [previously it was] really
hard to evidence it because paperwork and the way we
document things doesnt reflect that. (Practitioner 1;
Practitioner 2).
However, our respondents were at pains to emphasise
that the information about services that was generated
using the SRI was not assessed by anyone except the
services themselves. This self-assessment aspect of the
tool was seen to be appropriate because it allowed
recovery to grow organically, to be owned by services
and integrated thoroughly into practice - a process that
could not be rushed (Practitioner 2). Information about
services was seen to be most useful if services could use
it in their own ways, for improvement of their own
work; whereas our respondents feared that resistance to
the tool would arise if the data were subject to scrutiny
by the government (NGO 1; NGO 2). Indeed, concern
had arisen due to government plans to make implemen-
tation of the SRI mandatory within services. In response,
Government actors were careful to note that they would
not monitor the results of the SRI, but merely its use:
while services must undertake self-assessment using the
SRI, the results of that self-assessment would be purely
for the services own use (Government 2).
Like the narrative approach, the SRI has been widely
adopted as an effective technology for exemplifying and
instantiating recovery in Scottish mental health services.
However, it has an additional advantage over and above
those offered by the narrative approach. By mandating
the Scottish Recovery Network to develop a formal self-
assessment tool, the Scottish Government were able to
instrumentalise the otherwise rather vague values
associated with recovery. Government actors saw this
formalisation of recovery goals in relation to service
provision as an important step in inculcating recovery
within Scottish mental health services. In effect, the
design of the SRI took the discussion away from it
being a nice cosy service user discussion about isnt
recovery a nice thing into something we wanted to
directly apply to how we were doing services (Govern-
ment 2). By developing the SRI as a mandatory self-
assessment tool for service providers, the Scottish Gov-
ernment and the SRN have together produced and dis-
seminated an effective technology for engaging service
providers in the process of recovery itself.
Wellness Recovery Action Planning
Another recovery technology identified by our respon-
dents as having a significant impact on doing recovery
in Scotland was the Wellness Recovery Action Planning
(called WRAP for short) (Practitioner 1; Community 1;
NGO 1; NGO 2). WRAP originated in America and was
devised by Mary Ellen Copeland, herself a service user,
whose work on recovery developed out of her own
search for personal recovery. It has since been developed
as a tool for service users to manage their own recovery
by identifying strategies to restore personal wellness
and recovery [27]. WRAP locates the service user
within a larger community of service users, and places a
strong emphasis on peer support and the development
of an individual recovery plan [28]. By reflecting on how
the individual service user has stayed well in the past,
and by visualising the strategies that assisted others with
their recovery, service users create their own recovery
plans that document daily maintenance, triggers and
how to avoid them, warning signs and how to respond
to them, and a crisis plan[29]. According to the Scot-
tish Recovery Network, the use of WRAP in Scotland is
underpinned by the core principles of hope, perso-
nal responsibility, education, self advocacy and sup-
port, and individuals work within these principles to
create their own WRAP. SRN adds that that Each plan
should include the following components [30]:
Wellness toolbox
Daily maintenance plan
Identification of triggers and associated action plan
Identification of early warning signs and associated
action plan
Identification of signs that things are breaking
down and associated action plan
Crisis planning
Post crisis planning
As this list demonstrates, the emphasis is on an indivi-
duals understanding of their own life. Mirroring the
emphasis on self-assessment in the SRI, WRAP is
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designed as a self-management tool. Also like SRI,
WRAP is not assessed, and individuals may journey
towards recovery at their own pace (Community 1).
As an effective aid to self-management, WRAP was
also seen to provide a valuable advertisement for the
benefits of the recovery approach, particularly among
service users.
[WRAP] is about how you live your life. All these
things are different tools that should be used and
the more we use them the more we will see recov-
ery. I think the consumers themselves are the biggest
inspiration in it because as they recover other people
want a bit of that. Other people want to go on their
own journey and recover also. - (Community 1)
However, SRN is careful to stress that Creating a
WRAP can be a challenging process and the process is
best supported by a trained facilitator in a group setting
[30]. Consequently, WRAP is chiefly used in the context
of inpatient and community mental health services or
self-help groups as part of a larger process of planning
individual treatment. The WRAP planning process is
administered by a facilitator and conducted either on a
one-to-one basis or within a group setting [30].
In principle, this process serves to disrupt the tradi-
tional practitioner-patient relationship within mental
health services by placing the service users perspective
at the centre of treatment/wellness planning. However,
our respondents had some concerns that the way
WRAP was being rolled out in Scotland might not be
best calculated to serve that aim. Specifically, a couple
of our respondents felt that too much emphasis was
being placed on WRAP as a means of recovery planning,
at the expense of other recovery technologies. WRAP is
one tool and yet it is being used across the country as if
it is the tool, said one (Community 1). Another com-
plained that proprietary controls over the use of WRAP
had restricted the extent to which it had been rolled out
in practice. Copeland, who originally devised WRAP,
runs a large non-profit organisation, the Copeland Cen-
tre for Wellness and Recovery, and has registered and
trademarked the WRAP programme [31]. In conse-
quence, only facilitators who have undertaken official
training can offer WRAP training. In Scotland, only one
advanced-level trainer is available to train new facilita-
tors (NGO 2; [32]).
Other respondents noted that, while it was originally
intended that service users would themselves act as
facilitators, in Scotland mental health service staff are
also being trained to take up this role (Practitioner 1).
One service user commented that this represented
further evidence of the colonisation of a process that
had originally evolved within the service user
community; increasingly, this respondent declared,
recovery was being made to fit into the structures of
mental health services and government policy, and
hence was becoming something it was never meant to
be (Community 1). Another respondent warned that a
problem with current practices relating to WRAP was
that it was being instituted in a traditional way in a tra-
ditional environment (NGO 1). If WRAP was imple-
mented within services that lacked a wider recovery
orientation, another respondent feared, it would become
just another care plan (NGO 2).
These concerns point to an important limit to the
effectiveness of WRAP as a recovery technology. If
WRAP can only be successfully implemented within a
service setting which has already gone through the jour-
ney of becoming recovery oriented, then it is of little
value as a tool for spreading recovery within the Scottish
mental health system. At best, it may be used as one
among a number of techniques for implementing recov-
ery within services that have already adopted an appro-
priate orientation. At worst, however, it may be
assimilated into more traditional forms of service deliv-
ery that fail to embody the aims and values of recovery.
Far from assisting in the reorientation of mental health
services that recovery is intended to effect, there is thus
a risk that WRAP will be appropriated in a process of
colonisation whereby the concept of recovery is sub-
verted to the purpose of shoring up the existing social
relations of mental health work.
Peer support
The final recovery technology discussed at some length
by our respondents was the practice of peer support. In
the Scottish recovery context, peer support involves the
employment within mental health services of individuals
with a lived experience of mental ill-health. Such indivi-
duals are employed not only to provide experience-
based support to service users, but also to exemplify and
inculcate the values of recovery within the service itself
[33].
The idea of piloting a programme of peer support was
first mooted in papers by SRN director Simon Brad-
street in 2005 [34,15]. That year had seen a visit to Scot-
land by Gene Johnson, a peer support trainer from
Arizona. Peer support was also discussed in exchanges
related to the International Initiative for Mental Health
Leadership (IIMHL) conference in New Zealand in 2005
(Community 2). This was followed in 2006 by a litera-
ture review and a national conference on peer support
which aimed to answer the questions: what can we
learn about peer support to enable Scotland to do it
itself? and how can we get people to understand peer
support enough to do it? (NGO 1). The idea was
adopted into policy in 2007, when the document Deli-
vering for Mental Health committed the Scottish
Smith-Merry et al. International Journal of Mental Health Systems 2011, 5:11
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Page 7 of 12
Government to piloting the paid employment of peer
support workers [7].
The Support Worker Pilot programme was finally
undertaken in 2008-2009 by the Scottish Government
and SRN, and was implemented in five health boards.
Most of the peer support workers had no defined role
when they were first employed; rather, they worked with
services to determine what an appropriate role might
be. Across the pilot sites, two main facets of the role
were identified: sharing lived experience and model-
ling recovery [35]. Bradstreet and Pratt have since
described the peer support role as offering mutuality,
empowerment, modelling hope and the sharing of lived
experience with service users [33].
In fulfilling this role, peer support workers impact on
services by demonstrating that recovery is possible.
From a service users perspective, peer support workers
do indeed seem to provide effective models of recovery,
and thereby give hope that recovery is possible [35]. At
the same time, the employment of current or past ser-
vice users within a service setting also works to endorse
the individual, experience-based knowledge that service
users themselves possess. As such, it serves to validate
other key tools of recovery such as WRAP, which
emphasise the importance of self-knowledge and self-
management. One respondent noted the radical way
that this has impacted on services:
They now employ acute inpatient forum workers
who are peer support workers and that has shifted
things around a little. A user organisation is now
placing peer support workers in acute units so they
can assess patient experience and it has very much
come from a local recovery network. - (NGO 1)
In effect, peer support workers help to challenge tradi-
tional hierarchies within mental health services by acting
as a disruptive force to change the culture of mental
health service delivery (NGO 1). Moreover, the Peer
Support Pilot project indicated that the presence of peer
support workers were effective in helping to reorient
services toward recovery values (Practitioner 1;
[33,35]). Reflecting on their experience of the pilot pro-
ject within their own health board area, one respondent
commented: the peer support pilot...was hugely benefi-
cial in the areas that the peer support workers were
working in looking at things like the language and the
ethos of recovery (Practitioner 1). The employment of
peer support workers was also seen as beneficial in
working to break down the us and them mentality
whereby staff assumed that they held all the power and
knowledge in the system, while service users were trea-
ted as the objects of staff knowledge [33].
However, the evaluation of the pilot program also
noted that while the peer support workers had helped
to move the service toward a recovery orientation, their
work had been made much more difficult where those
services were not already moving in that direction. This
placed a heavy burden on service users to pull the sys-
tem into shape - and expectation that the evaluation
judged to be problematic [33,35]. As with the use of
WRAP, the effectiveness of peer support to effect a
change in the orientation of traditional mental health
services was seen to be limited in the absence of other
measures to implement a recovery approach.
Discussion
From the Scottish point of view, recovery is a doubly
imported concept: imported into Scotland from different
international contexts; and imported from the service
user community into the world of policy and practice.
Yet that importation has enjoyed a significant degree of
success. This has been achieved through the creation of
a number of recovery technologies which have helped to
disseminate recovery within its new environment. Each
of the four technologies that we have focussed on here
works towards the same ends of instantiating recovery
as a practice within the Scottish mental health system,
and of exemplifying the meaning and values of recovery
to service users and practitioners elsewhere within that
system.
The efficacy of recovery narratives as a recovery tech-
nology lies especially in their ability to exemplify and
publicise what recovery means to service users, and in
providing accessible and easily disseminated evidence
that recovery works. Narratives drawn from the lives of
local people also help to give a distinctly local flavour to
the idea of recovery, and encourages ownership of the
recovery approach by the population at which it is
aimed. As we have seen, the stories collected by the
Scottish Recovery Networks narrative project have been
used to construct an account of a distinctly Scottish ver-
sion of recovery. Whether or not this version really dif-
fers from how recovery is enacted in other countries is
beside the point. What matters is that, through the
practices of telling and recording Scottish stories of
recovery, the actors involved have come to regard recov-
ery as a national achievement, which expresses the dis-
tinct character of the Scottish people and their ability to
cope with mental illness. The wide distribution of these
narratives among both service user and practitioner net-
works enables other Scots to appreciate the relevance of
recovery to their own lives. That appreciation is rein-
forced, moreover, by the incorporation of narrative
methods into therapy, whereby service users are encour-
aged to narrate their own stories of recovery, thereby
Smith-Merry et al. International Journal of Mental Health Systems 2011, 5:11
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Page 8 of 12
expanding the community of individuals for whom the
idea of recovery provides a means of making sense of
their own lived experience of mental illness and mental
health.
If recovery narratives act chiefly by giving a voice to
service users, the Scottish Recovery Indicator specifically
targets service providers. By specifying a highly disci-
plined process of self-assessment and collective reflec-
tion, the SRI serves to make apparent some of the key
principles, practices and values associated with the pro-
motion of recovery within mental health service provi-
sion. Through the activities and conversations that
must be undertaken when completing the requisite
forms, the concept of recovery is firmly imprinted in the
minds of those using the SRI. As a means of disseminat-
ing a recovery perspective within the mental health ser-
vices, moreover, the SRI has the additional advantage of
being endorsed both by government and by the Scottish
Recovery Network. At the same time, it retains an ele-
ment of voluntarism and freedom from external evalua-
tion - values that, like the narrative research that
informed the design of the SRI, are seen to be distinc-
tively Scottish in contrast to American recovery assess-
ment tools.
The fact that the SRI is seen to have been adapted in
accordance with specifically Scottish ideals of recovery
also contrasts with the career of another imported
recovery technology, namely Wellness Recovery Action
Planning. Like the use of recovery narratives as a thera-
peutic technique, WRAP is intended as a means of dis-
seminating recovery amongst both service users and
practitioners by reconfiguring the relationships which
mediate care and treatment. Using WRAP in service
delivery, the service users experience, self-knowledge
and powers of self-determination are made central to
therapeutic interactions, with implications for how both
the service user and the practitioner envisage their own
roles. However, the fact that WRAP is a trademarked
technology means that Scottish recovery advocates have
not been able to adapt it to their own ideals as they did
with the SRI. Meanwhile, some recovery advocates voice
fears that WRAP is being re-appropriated into more tra-
ditional, practitioner-dominated models of care that run
counter to the values of recovery. However well-inten-
tioned WRAP may be as a recovery technology, its effi-
cacy appears to have been compromised, at least in the
Scottish situation, by legal restrictions on the extent to
which it can be owned by service users - an ironic out-
come in view of WRAPs professed intention of empow-
ering users.
No such problems attach to the appointment of ser-
vice users as peer support workers on the staff of the
mental health services as a means of orienting services
towards recovery values. As with WRAP, the placement
of peer support workers within services is intended to
disrupt entrenched expectations about staff-patient rela-
tionships positions and the validity of service user
knowledge in the context of treatment. The fact that
peer support workers function well in this role also
serves to demonstrate the validity of the recovery con-
cept: in effect, peer support workers act as living embo-
diments of recovery. The only doubts that our
respondents voiced about peer support related to how
much can be achieved by such means, in the absence of
more systematic efforts to reorient service delivery. Ulti-
mately, the implementation of recovery requires holistic
change in the organisation and social relations of mental
health services and in the understanding of mental
health and illness that informs those services. Placing
individual service users as peer support workers within
mental health services may serve to exemplify some of
the values of recovery, but such workers will rarely be
in a position to catalyse the kind of wholesale restruc-
turing of practice and understanding that will be neces-
sary to fully implement recovery.
Our argument in this paper has been that the success-
ful enactment of recoverys key technologies in Scotland
has meant that the recovery discourse has become a
hegemonic one guiding the operation of the mental
health system. Indeed, not one of our respondents could
point to an area within the system that was fully resis-
tant to recovery. Even within psychiatry, where it was
supposed some areas of resistance might lie, respon-
dents felt that any resistance resulted from a lack of
understanding about recovery and that any mis-under-
standing psychiatrists might have about recovery was
slowly changing as the recovery discourse came to per-
vade the system and its operation [Practitioner 2; NGO
2; Community 2; NGO 1; Community 1]. It is interest-
ing to note, then, that this success has provided, for our
respondents, one of the major sources of worry about
recovery. The recovery discourse has become so central
in Scotland that it is in fact a difficult thing to argue
against [NGO 2]. One respondent commented:
There has been a criticism of the work.... It is
impossible to disagree with so as soon as you do
argue with it you are seen as some sort of evil anti-
helping people type person when you are actually
trying to make a cogent point. Its almost too PC to
disagree with and I dont think that is helpful. -
(NGO 1)
This is a considerable problem because, as this
respondent noted, it means that valid critiques of recov-
ery are not heard. For this reason, some of those indivi-
duals who were most integral to the initial move of
recovery from social movement into policy are starting
Smith-Merry et al. International Journal of Mental Health Systems 2011, 5:11
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to think beyond recovery and push for new perspec-
tives to enter the mental health discourse [Community
1]. A recent article by Cowan and Tilley [14] offers a
more in-depth critique of recovery along this vein and
will provide a good basis for further work in the area.
Conclusions
This paper has examined the way that four specific
recovery technologies have been devised and imple-
mented with the aim of disseminating recovery through
the mental health system in Scotland. The Scottish case
has been presented not so much as an exemplar of
recovery practice, but as an example of a system which
has sought to implement recovery in an holistic way
and the technologies which have been put in place to
do this. We have shown how each recovery technology
acts in different ways to instantiate and exemplify the
meaning of recovery at different sites within the mental
health system. And we have looked at some of the fac-
tors influencing the effectiveness of those different tech-
nologies in promoting change within that system as a
whole. We are now in a position to venture some more
general conclusions about the role of recovery technolo-
gies in fulfilling the aim of implementing recovery
within the Scottish mental health system.
One implication of thinking about the different tools
and initiatives discussed in this paper as technologies
for the dissemination of recovery is to draw attention to
the ability of those technologies to move from one loca-
tion within the mental health system to another. In
order to effectively instantiate and exemplify recovery at
different sites in the system, those technologies must
remain relatively stable as they reproduced or re-enacted
at different locations. All the technologies that we have
discussed have something of this character. Recovery
narratives collected through the Scottish Recovery Net-
works narrative research project are distributed as
printed pamphlets or through online resources, while
the collection of new narratives from particular locales
has been modelled on the SRNs methodology. The
Scottish Recovery Indicator provides a standardised tool
that can be accessed and implemented in similar ways
within different service settings. The same can be said
of WRAP. The employment of peer support workers,
meanwhile, provides a way in which individuals who
personally embody the values of recovery can be
appointed to work in diverse locations within the mental
health services.
At the same time, it is clear that these different tech-
nologies serve to instantiate recovery in rather different
ways. This is important, since the effective implementa-
tion of recovery implies holistic change both in the pro-
vision of mental health services and in the expectations
of service providers and service users alike. The ability
of any one technology to achieve such holistic change
within an established and entrenched system of mental
health care is likely to be limited, as indeed our respon-
dents noted with respect to the impact of peer support
workers. Rather, such change is much more likely to be
effected through the influence of multiple recovery tech-
nologies acting on different parts of the system. In this
respect, the vagueness with which the overarching con-
cept of recovery is itself defined, and the tendency to
talk about it as a rather loose set of values rather than
as a particular body of practices, actually appears as
something of an advantage. Recovery, it seems, can be
interpreted and exemplified through a diversity of prac-
tices and processes. In effect, this loose definition of
recovery permits the development of multiple tools and
technologies that can be used to import the values of
recovery into the mental health system in multiple ways
and at multiple sites. A similar point holds true if we
think of the geographical importation of recovery into
Scotland. Here too, the interpretative flexibility sur-
rounding the meaning of recovery appears to have been
beneficial, with the collection of indigenous Scottish
recovery narratives and the adaptation of the Scottish
Recovery Indicator to the needs of local services both
contributing to the sense of a distinctly Scottish version
of recovery that has helped to promote ownership of
the concept amongst both service users and service
providers.
In effect, the importation of recovery into the Scottish
mental health services has involved striking a balance
between exploiting the diversity of interpretative possibi-
lities permitted by the rather vague definition of recov-
ery itself, and maintaining the stability of the different
technologies that have been adopted as a means of
instantiating and exemplifying recovery in practice. The
maintenance of such a balance is not inherent in the
concept of recovery itself; rather, it must be achieved
through the assertion of a degree of social control over
the ways that recovery is interpreted and implemented.
In this respect, the role of the Scottish Recovery Net-
work appears to have been crucial. As an organisation
that brings together a community of service users and
service providers with an interest in promoting recovery
in Scotland, SRN itself embodies many of the key values
of recovery. Moreover, with official backing from the
Scottish Government, SRN has been instrumental in
designing, domesticating and disseminating three of the
four recovery technologies that we have considered in
this paper, namely recovery narratives, the Scottish
Recovery Indicator and peer support. Indeed, it is strik-
ing that the one recovery technology about which our
respondents voiced serious misgivings, namely WRAP,
is the only which over which, for proprietary reasons,
SRN has been unable to exert significant control.
Smith-Merry et al. International Journal of Mental Health Systems 2011, 5:11
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The key place of individual experience within defini-
tions of recovery and the technologies that we have
described raises some issues about the possibilities for
the effective implementation of recovery. One of the
government respondents, quoted above, spoke of using
the recovery discourse to get at the cultures and beha-
viours of the system. This aim, along with the stated
problems faced by peer support workers in their task of
performing or modelling recovery within services, draws
attention to the issues involved in implementing an indi-
vidual-focused concept such as recovery to address
entrenched systemic issues. While Scotland professes an
inequalities approach to all policy, mental health
included, the recovery programs itself has not yet
addressed this area in any substantive ways [36]. Recent
work by several scholars has drawn attention to this
issue [37,38]. Hopper [38], drawing on the work of
Amartya Sen, has addressed this through describing the
possibilities raised by linking recovery with a capabil-
ities approach which addresses the individual social and
structural context of need. This approach, although
complex and difficult to operationalise [37], might be a
useful starting point for thinking about the ways tech-
nologies for a recovery-oriented mental health system
might also address the systematic inequalities that
entrench disadvantage and bring about social as well as
individual recovery. Further research is needed which
teases out this complex issue.
Our findings have implications for the kinds of strategies
that might best be adopted by policy makers and activists
working to implement a recovery-oriented mental health
system, whether in Scotland or elsewhere. As we have
seen, recovery is generally defined in terms of the kinds of
values that should pervade the provision of mental health
care, and the way that service providers and service users
conceive of their respective roles and relationships. But
that definition says little about how such values and
changes in role can best be achieved in practice. Our find-
ings indicated that the holistic reorientation of service pro-
vision around the aims of recovery will likely depend upon
the promotion and dissemination of multiple recovery
technologies tailored to the local peculiarities of mental
health care, and acting in different ways and at different
sites in the system. Without such technologies, the mean-
ing of recovery as a set of values will remain unrealised in
practice. But if the overall effect of those technologies is
indeed to be a holistic change in service provision, some
measure of control will need to be asserted over the way
that they are interpreted and implemented in practice. In
the absence of such control, there is a serious risk that the
piecemeal implementation of recovery technologies will
simply result in their appropriation into more traditional
structures and social relations of mental health care. In
the Scottish setting, this control has been exerted by the
Scottish Recovery Network, with backing from the Scot-
tish Government. Whether similar models might best be
adopted elsewhere, or whether other approaches will
prove more appropriate to other local and national set-
tings, is a matter for conjecture and experimentation.
List of abbreviations
Throughout this paper we refer to respondents using a signifier that
combines the category which best represents the position they were
speaking from, plus a numerical identifier: e.g. NGO 2. Although we are
aware that individuals occupy multiple positions in the mental health
community, for example as both government worker and community
activist or NGO worker and service user, we have made these distinctions
for clarity of referencing. ROPI: Recovery Oriented Practice Indicator; SRI:
Scottish Recovery Indicator; SRN: Scottish Recovery Network; WRAP: Wellness
Recovery Action Planning.
Acknowledgements and Funding
The research presented here is part of KnowandPol, an Integrated Project
funded by the European Commission under Priority Seven (Citizens and
Governance) of the Sixth RTD Framework Programme.
Author details
1
School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, School of
Public Health, University of Sydney.
2
School of Social and Political Science,
University of Edinburgh, Room 4.5, 34 Buccleuch Place, EH8 9JS, Edinburgh.
3
ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum, University of Edinburgh, St
Johns Land, Holyrood Road, EH8 8AQ, Edinburgh.
Authors contributions
JSM collected and analysed the data and constructed the first draft of the
paper. RF and SS made substantive contributions to the structure and
arguments made within the paper. All authors approved the final draft.
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Received: 31 January 2011 Accepted: 15 May 2011
Published: 15 May 2011
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doi:10.1186/1752-4458-5-11
Cite this article as: Smith-Merry e| o|.: Implementing recovery: an
analysis of the key technologies in Scotland. ||eo||oo| .ooo| o|
/e|o| |eo||| ,|e 2011 5:11.
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Smith-Merry et al. International Journal of Mental Health Systems 2011, 5:11
http://www.ijmhs.com/content/5/1/11
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